What's RenderMan? The Tools News Support

Slim™ - The Shader Tool

Increase productivity with Slim’s shader tools.
Create original RenderMan shaders interactively.
Customize Slim with your own RSL code and scripts.

Manage and Create Shaders

Slim is a powerful shader management tool developed to meet the demands of sophisticated productions. Through scripting, Slim’s support for Maya attributes, and its general extensibility, Slim provides automated and customized solutions for shading workflow. Slim also functions as a shader generator, allowing RenderMan shaders to be generated interactively, without programming. With Slim it is possible to generate a wide range of the highest quality procedural shaders. Slim, as a combined shader generation and management system, plays a key role in RenderMan Studio™.

Create high quality procedural shaders — without programming.

Stages of a procedural water shader

Direct Connection to Maya®

From Slim, you connection Slim networks directly to Maya objects, or import Slim shaders into the Maya hypergraph. Create a new shader, and then immediately import it into Maya where you are able to attach it like any other Maya material. Open multiple palettes, external and internal, and drag and drop between them. When you save your Maya scene, your Slim palettes and shader connections are saved along with it, so the next time you open your Maya® scene, all the Slim information is right there, too.

A Slim allows intuitive shader editing

Versatile Environment

Slim allows artists to create shaders without programming, but Slim's sophisticated environment gives technical shader developers the ability to fully customize Slim for the needs of any studio. With Slim scripting, repetitive tasks can be automated and customized workflows can be developed.

Layer Your Building Blocks

Build new shaders from the ground up, including layered shaders, simply by creating connections with Slim’s powerful set of building blocks. The building blocks come in a variety of types, from surfaces to functions, from image files to animated Maya attributes. There are enough building blocks to create innumerable types of shaders, and once the techniques are mastered, Slim makes generating a wide range of high quality procedural shaders, quick and easy.

Build shaders in the graph editor

Build Your Own Blocks

Slim is highly extensible, allowing developers to go far beyond Slim’s set of core building block functions. Using the familiar RenderMan shading language, developers can modify the existing set of building blocks, or write completely new Slim shader nodes. So instead of writing a completely new shader, developers can now just write a new shader node, which can be used as just another “block” in Slim.

Slim Stands Alone

For even more potential, Slim can be run as a completely independent tool, in stand-alone mode. This allows genuine RenderMan shaders to be authored for custom productions, which can be used in any RenderMan compliant pipeline.